Wednesday, October 23, 2013

All Holy Trinities Are Not Created Equal

Syl over at MMO Gypsy
touches on an interesting topic, where she compares the Holy Trinity of
Tanking, Healing, and Damaging (DPSing) to time. The gist is she says that
tanks create time by keeping the mobs out of the squishies’ faces; healers
preserve and extend time by filling those health bars right back up; and DPS
are the drivers of time, as they’re the ones progressing the fight by removing
enemy health.

It’s a pretty apt comparison. Run out of health, and your
time is up. But hidden at the end of her post is a rather fascinating little
statement:

It’s often true that healers and tanks get a lot of accolades
for pulling off super difficult feats, whereas DPS are often outside the
limelight unless they really screw up (or, alternatively, they play pseudo-tank
or pseudo-healer and help push past a difficult breakpoint). But on the other
hand, as a normal-mode raider, I can tell you that we do value our decent DPS
players quite a bit. When you have a DPS player who is incapable of getting out
of the fire, or can’t put out the numbers required, it’s immediately noticeable
(often by the healers, naturally).

Using Syl’s comparison of role to time, DPS can shorten the
encounter length and make healing easier by having higher throughput. The shorter the fight, the less total damage taken over
the length of the fight. Healers can spend more resources early on in the
fight, and therefore healing is easier. So good DPS in turn can make a huge
difference to whether a kill is achieved or not. The opposite is true, of
course, where a good healing team can make up for a shortage of DPS, assuming
you don’t hit any enrage timers.

So whereas in normal mode raiding or higher where good DPS
players are just as difficult to find as good tanks or healers, in lower levels
of difficulty DPS get a bum rap almost exclusively. Why is that? Syl suggests
that it’s a numbers game. Basically, if you had equal number of healers as DPS,
then we’d shower the DPS with huzzahs as well.

I’m not sure I really buy that argument on its own, though,
because if the raid dies in LFR the first people blamed are the healers, for
better or worse. The DPS might not have had enough DPS to actually complete the
encounter before damage ramped up, or they stood in the fire, but nope, people
died, so it’s the healers’ fault. I don’t think it’s just a matter of there
being fewer people in a given role that suddenly makes them better or more
heroic looking to the general audience. Honestly, I think this is just another symptom of a different problem.

(As an aside, this is why I’m actually a fan of pass/fail
mechanics that result in instant death. Can’t blame the healer if the mechanic
knocks you out of the arena or straight out kills you. Maybe not for
everything, but once in a while I enjoy having them.)

My theory is that DPS players get the bad reputation because DPS is
the default role. Everything in game really requires some amount of damage
output, because how else do you kill monsters? Healers -- and tanks to a lesser
extent -- are only really used in group content, so your average MMO player who
trundles around the continent by themselves is going to be DPS and DPS only.
Therefore when unskilled players enter group settings, the only thing they know
is DPS. They’re not the healers or the tanks, so you end up with a
disproportionate amount of the populace at the lower end of skill in the DPS
role.

Actual distribution of roles within a 25-man raid in WoW

Maybe because they’re new, or maybe because they never had to learn or a
chance to learn how to play their class, but a large chunk of them are definitely
not good players, as anybody utilizing random dungeon finder modes can
attest to, in either basic scenarios, LFR, or five-man dungeons in WoW.

Players
who do end up tanking or healing have experience at least doing DPS, because it
was the default role, so they can concentrate on learning more about their role and not the game in general. Their mistakes are also quite visible, so feedback is immediate and can be applied immediately.

I think Star Wars: The Old Republic actually attempts to
solve this default role problem pretty neatly. Or at least, I like the idea,
given that I haven’t played the game beyond the demo. Everybody in SWTOR gets a
companion NPC to help them out. The companion NPC can be a healer, a DPS, or a
tank, so therefore you’re automatically in group content all the time, and DPS
is no longer the default role, though caveat there is that you’re still stuck
on the tutorial planet without a companion. I almost wish I played end game
content in SWTOR to see if I could compare it to WoW as far as the sociology of
trinity roles goes.

And if we could get rid of the default role issue, then
there’s no reason why group content couldn’t be one tank-one healer-one dps,
rather than so lopsided in terms of bringing DPS. We could also spread the love
around as far as unskilled players goes, and every role could be equally as
annoyed by poor player performance. At which point the next step would be
educating players and making your game easier to learn, or at least give enough
feedback to let players understand why their performance got them killed.

11 comments:

Hmm, yes, I understand the feeling that DPS is often not valued equally to healers and tanks, but I'm not sure if it's because of the higher amount (of players) usually needed, as Syl wrote, or because of it being the 'default role'. Perhaps a bit of both. Indeed it may be easier to 'hide' behind the other DPSers, while it becomes clear very easily if you're performing suboptimal as a tank or healer.

I actually started out playing a support role myself (lore-master in LotRO, a debuffing/support healing class) and then healer (sage healer in SWTOR). For me DPSing is much harder to learn because I'm simply not too interested in big numbers. Also, I secretly like "needing" to perform well, the feeling makes raiding more exciting for me! So it's also a personality/personal taste thing, in which I'm probably in the minority.

I love big crits and I cannot lie. I honestly find being a good DPS in an MMO harder than being a good healer. As DPS there's no stopping. If you're not hitting buttons, you're sub-optimal, whereas healers often have an ebb and flow to them. I can't speak to tanking because every time I try it I hate it, except FFXIV, strangely enough. But healing was an acquired taste for me, though I love it now.

There could be something to the idea of being lost in the crowd, meaning you just get fewer moments in general to be visibly heroic. It's easy, if fallacious, to assume if someone isn't being obviously awesome that they're totally slacking, but to be fair healers also have that issue. If nothing goes wrong, then neither healing nor DPSing stand out.

Haha! Interestingly enough, DPS in tabletop games don't suffer the same stigma that DPS do in video games, but that's likely due to the fact that the game is played with tightly-knit groups of friends, often in-person. But they both do like bug numbers :D

Meaning that while your DPS can’t completely suck on normal, the fights are fairly lax on tuning and the tanks/healers performing well often makes a larger difference than DPS.

In heroic, though, you live or die on your DPS. Now this is partially true because you won’t even get to heroic modes without decent tanks and healers, but your healers/tanks being better than a certain skill level adds little on heroic. There’s a reason heroic guilds focus on gearing DPS first — their performance is far more important on heroic modes (the tanking/healing requirements are much laxer, relatively speaking).

In heroic modes, 95% of the wipes are due to one of two things:

1, people messing up a mechanic of the fight2, not enough DPS

There are very, very few cases where a group wipes (in a group of equivalently skilled players) because of the tanks or healers.

Honestly, I think the problem is there tends not to be many DPS checks until heroic raids and some normal fights. That’s why DPS are typically undervalued.

-----------------

"As an aside, this is why I’m actually a fan of pass/fail mechanics that result in instant death. Can’t blame the healer if the mechanic knocks you out of the arena or straight out kills you. Maybe not for everything, but once in a while I enjoy having them."

I completely agree. It's one of the reasons I actually really liked Ultraxion -- if you didn't hit Heroic Will, you simply died to Fading Light. You could not be healed through it. It's also one of the reasons why (Heroic) Nefarian might be my favorite fight -- Crackle meant that if you were stupid and stood in bad as it went off, you died. No way for healers to save you.

"And if we could get rid of the default role issue, then there’s no reason why group content couldn’t be one tank-one healer-one dps, rather than so lopsided in terms of bringing DPS. "

Well, how would that work in larger groups? You can theoretically keep increasing damage done in some manner, but once you get past a certain number of healers you can't increase tank damage because otherwise the tank spikes too much. So then you have to add raid damage (and a lot of it) to every single fight.

On top of that, how do you add extra tanks? Sure, you can theoretically set up a boss debuff that requires you to have 8 tanks rotating taunts in a 25 man raid but is that really good design? And if you keep it to, say, 3 tanks/12 healers/12 DPS that's a HELL of a lot of raid damage going out.

Giving mobs more HP and thus requiring more DPSers is simply a lot easier than trying to scale up damage to require 8+ healers or requiring half a dozen or more tanks on every single fight.

"Honestly, I think the problem is there tends not to be many DPS checks until heroic raids and some normal fights. That’s why DPS are typically undervalued."~ Which is super interesting when you compare that statement to mine in my Flex raiding post. This really indicates that perhaps enrage timers should be stricter on lower difficulties to ensure that DPS can't be slacking. Maybe not a lot stricter, but perhaps it would increase the value of good DPS. On the other hand, in LFR, it might just make LFR completely unplayable rather than playable with a modicum of frustration.

"Well, how would that work in larger groups? You can theoretically keep increasing damage done in some manner, but once you get past a certain number of healers you can't increase tank damage because otherwise the tank spikes too much. So then you have to add raid damage (and a lot of it) to every single fight."~ The number of tanks can scale up. Just add more things to tank. Nefarian in Black Wing Descent was a great example of this. The beginning you really wanted three tanks (well, most made by with two tanks and a plate DPS) to deal with Nefarian, Onyxia, and the skeleton adds. Heroic Morchok could easily have been turned into a fight that required four tanks with the split. Add zones to soak damage, constant streams of adds, or if you were to implement the Warhammer MMO version of tanking and have players and mobs take up physical space via collision detection, tanks could quite literally wall things off. Fighting a huge dragon? Maybe it makes no sense that one or two tanks can hold off those massive jaws or wings, but maybe tanks can run interference.

Basically, right now there isn't a lot of creativity going into fights to force more than one tank, but there's plenty of things to be done to fight mechanics that could make multiple tanks scale. But I agree with you that single target damage certainly wouldn't scale with that many healers. It's definitely easier to just scale HP and add more DPS.

"Maybe not a lot stricter, but perhaps it would increase the value of good DPS. On the other hand, in LFR, it might just make LFR completely unplayable rather than playable with a modicum of frustration."

I think part of the problem is that you can level while pressing one button -- be it Fireball, Sinister Strike, or Mortal Strike.

I am absolutely not advocating we make leveling very difficult (especially not initially) but it does mean that idea of having to do a certain amount of damage in a certain amount of time is a completely foreign concept until you hit raids, basically.

I'd wager most people don't even think about optimizing damage until then -- especially since long term damage optimization means less short term burst...and they've been using short term burst for leveling.

"The beginning you really wanted three tanks (well, most made by with two tanks and a plate DPS) to deal with Nefarian, Onyxia, and the skeleton adds."

Nah, easier to have the Skeleton adds on the Onyxia tank. But let's say you're correct -- do you change the number of skeletons for different raid sizes and require each of them to be solo tanked?

"Heroic Morchok could easily have been turned into a fight that required four tanks with the split."

That's very different from eight tanks ;)

"Basically, right now there isn't a lot of creativity going into fights to force more than one tank, but there's plenty of things to be done to fight mechanics that could make multiple tanks scale."

I think the problem is that it becomes very hard to force like eight tanks on every single fight while still having it be interesting design. And you can't reasonably go from 2 tanks on some fights and 5 on others and 8 on still others -- so Blizzard just makes stuff two tankable.

"I think part of the problem is that you can level while pressing one button -- be it Fireball, Sinister Strike, or Mortal Strike."~ Yup. I agree here 100%. Interestingly, I think that's where the Timeless Isle got it right. Mobs don't die in a single burst cycle for some of the harder ones because they have enough health to ride it out. I wonder what would happen if Blizzard just applied a modifier to health which was +x% or +(2x)% where x is the level of the monster. It might make people want to kill things faster, without necessarily making it all that much harder.

"I think the problem is that it becomes very hard to force like eight tanks on every single fight while still having it be interesting design. And you can't reasonably go from 2 tanks on some fights and 5 on others and 8 on still others -- so Blizzard just makes stuff two tankable."~ Probably true in the end. It is definitely easier to just keep it down to two tanks. I think there could be some pretty interesting fights if that weren't the case though.

"I wonder what would happen if Blizzard just applied a modifier to health which was +x% or +(2x)% where x is the level of the monster. It might make people want to kill things faster, without necessarily making it all that much harder."

Possibly, yeah. They'd need to increase the XP per mob, though (three times as long to kill, three times the XP) and hope the length of the combat would make people want to figure out a way to be more effective at damaging it.

"It is definitely easier to just keep it down to two tanks. I think there could be some pretty interesting fights if that weren't the case though."

Oh, absolutely. But it's Ulduar hard-mode syndrome. People loved the "organic" hard modes of Ulduar. Managing to do that for every fight in every raid is a hell of a lot harder, though.

"I don’t think it’s just a matter of there being fewer people in a given role that suddenly makes them better or more heroic looking to the general audience."

Oh, it's not that they're better per say or more heroic - it's just that they're Out There In Front, by virtue of their lesser numbers and role, and they have unequaled power to eff everything up. For better or worse, they got far fewer folks to blame screwups on! I may be the huntard who had Aspect of the Pack on for the entire fight, but since my hunter is usually towards the top of DPS, I can totally blame one of the five other hunters in the LFR group, and it's likely that I'll be believed - or at least given a pass.

................

"Maybe because they’re new, or maybe because they never had to learn or a chance to learn how to play their class"

All of the above. There will ALWAYS be someone who is looking at a dungeon or LFR for the first time, and for many folks, reading up ahead of time is well and good but not the same as doing.

Yet I think there's a learning curve associated with taking up group content like LFD or LFR. Whenever I level a nooblet alt, I am constantly reminded that solo questing as DPS does nothing to help you understand the pleasantries necessary to get through LFD without annoying the crap out of everyone. I've lost count of how many hunters I've taught how to turn their pet's Growl off, and most of 'em had no idea you could even do that, or that it's necessary because it pulls threat from the tank. (Strangely, their pet dying constantly does not seem to make them think something's off.) While things like that are particularly frequent in Deadmines/Gnomeregan/Wailing Caverns, sometimes happens all the way up to the mid 40s in Dire Maul.

And LFD does not really help you all that much as a healer when it comes to doing LFR. The sudden, drastic increase in the number of bodies to be healed means the entire default setup you've probably gotten used to (using F1 through F5 to select your four other party members) is almost 100% useless. The speedier reaction time LFR requires means that the old way of clicking on someone and then hitting a key is too slow. I'd love it if Blizzard went back and added LFR in for old raids so that you could have the raid experience PRIOR to hitting max level. Just hit 60? Congrats, you've unlocked Molten Core LFR. Just hit 80? Have some Naxx LFR, and so on. I couldn't heal LFR remotely effectively until I installed an addon for that purpose. Even with the addon, gear and gear modifications make an enormous difference in output (comparing my main shaman to my just-started-ToT druid is a laugh). But what in LFD is going to show you that putting gems and crap on your equipment actually does help?

................

"And if we could get rid of the default role issue, then there’s no reason why group content couldn’t be one tank-one healer-one dps, rather than so lopsided in terms of bringing DPS. We could also spread the love around as far as unskilled players goes, and every role could be equally as annoyed by poor player performance."

Isn't this sort of setup one of the points of scenarios? Sure, you get random folks for regular scenarios, but you can easily set that structure up for the heroic ones, since you need a premade group of three.

That said, I'm not sure I could handle more than two tanks zoning in and announcing that it's their first time here, anything they need to know?